The Quiet Shift That Changed Everything for Me
The Real Career Transformation Begins Somewhere Else
The Feeling Eye revealed itself to me in 2016.
I didn’t know that’s what I would call it eventually. There were no visions of blinding white light in meditation, or dramatic spiritual perceptions. Just something quiet, yet powerfully energizing and resonant.
At the time, I only knew that something inside me had begun responding to life in a way it never had before.
The autumn of 2016 found me between jobs, uncertain about what my career and finances would look like.
The old me would have panicked and launched into frantic action… applying for jobs tirelessly, and “figuring things out” with that gnawing feeling that I wasn’t doing enough. The urge to panic. The urge to “take charge”, and send out résumés and make things happen.
This time, something was decisively different. That familiar feeling of trying to outrun uncertainty by doing more was gone.
There was this quiet knowing inside me saying, “STOP applying for jobs the conventional way. It has never worked for you, and you know it too well. There IS a different way through this.”
I didn’t know what that meant. But the more I sat with it, the more I found myself in a calm certainty that contradicted every survival instinct screaming at me to panic.
Something began happening that I couldn’t explain:
My life experience had convinced me that thinking harder or trying harder simply didn’t work for me. So instead, I acted on the two dominant impulses I could feel:
I started to meditate for the sake of enjoying meditation, without an ulterior motive.
I stopped trying to orchestrate outcomes, and opened myself to possibilities I couldn’t yet imagine.
What followed was a chain of seemingly serendipitous events: a friend mentioning a mentor; binge-watching hundreds of personal development videos on YouTube; enrolling in various learning programs; landing in social media communities; Facebook comments opening another door. Each one pulled me deeper into a dimension I didn’t know I was so ready to explore, and none of it I could have planned.
Update: If you’d like a deeper dive into this part my experience, I wrote about it a later article. You can read it here:
About eight weeks after I stopped forcing everything, I noticed something that frightened and comforted me at the same time:
I was still living on my savings and didn’t have a job. Nothing external had visibly improved. Yet I wasn’t even slightly worried anymore. The tightness in my chest that had followed me every morning was gone.
This inner shift was almost imperceptible to me at first. I actually wondered whether I had become irresponsible, or had stopped caring. Or had I just mistaken will-power driven activity for responsibility all my life?
And then, I had my “aha” moment:
Pacing through my apartment one evening, I felt DEEPLY and UNCONDITIONALLY contented. So deeply contented that if someone had told me I was dying, my happy last words would have been “I am complete. There’s nothing pending for me.”
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t postponing my happiness until something else happened. I wasn’t looking for a future outcome.
I noticed a quiet sense of wellbeing that wasn’t triggered by anything outside me.
In the days that followed, answers to questions I’d carried for years began appearing effortlessly within my unrushed and unconditional state of joy. A constant joining of dots was happening inside me, accompanied with unceasing “aha” moments… from how all religions are interconnected, to what a specific scriptural verse really meant, to why I had been attracting certain experiences into my life. It became an endless stream of deep answers and realizations.
I felt no need to set or achieve goals or prove anything. I felt complete. Whole, right where I was.
I stopped over-scripting my life, allowing it to unfold. A persistent inner conviction came over me that everything will work out beautifully for me.
As more days unfolded, the shift also became apparent in my external environment. Until then, I had only heard people say that inner change affects outer results. I was witnessing this truth first-hand in my own life.
A recruiter approached me about a leadership position that seemed almost designed for me. It checked nearly every box on my career wish list, from the nature of the work to the people I wanted to work with, the organization, the culture, and the financial opportunity.
The irony was that there was only a slim possibility of me discovering this opportunity through my effort alone. The published job description was so different from the actual position that I would have overlooked it completely.
A few months later, that role also took me to Toronto (Canada), a place I had wanted to visit for years. Later, it also led me to an exclusive leadership event in Orlando. I was among the first cohort of leaders in the firm to attend this privileged event.
Something else happened that mattered even more:
The way I saw people changed.
Instead of relating to their current behaviour, I found myself naturally seeing who they were capable of becoming. Again and again, people seemed to grow into the potential I recognized in them. The generosity, trust and kindness I experienced in this role challenged almost every limiting belief I once held about what was possible inside a corporate environment.
Around the same time, I started writing. A lot. This wasn’t for an audience or a publication, but my personal journaling. Something inside me had begun making sense of itself, and writing became the most natural expression of that process. I still write that way today. Most of those pages have never been published.
As years passed, more shifts kept appearing across different areas of my life, and some of them are too personal to share openly.
Eventually, I had to stop calling them coincidences. I could no longer ignore the relationship between where my attention rested and the results I experienced.
That was the beginning of what I now call “The Feeling Eye”.
In sharing these experiences, my intent is not to boast of my accomplishments.
Life doesn’t become all peaches and cream. You still lose things. Plans and goals still fall apart. You still experience uncertainty. The difference is that those moments stop defining you because you’ve discovered something deeper that circumstances can’t easily disturb. Each experience makes you aware of the resistance you have, and also of the power you hold to release that resistance and become more of who you really are.
That’s inner alignment.
And that inner alignment trumps external algorithms and systems of success.
I say this from lived experience, from watching it unfold in my own life over and over.
Once this inner guidance becomes “activated”, life feels different. Decisions become clearer. Opportunities become easier to recognize. Situations become easier to navigate. You stop spending your energy forcing life to cooperate, and start noticing how marvelously it is already trying to help you.
That’s what The Feeling Eye is about.
Perhaps, as you’ve been reading this, your career has been quietly sitting in the background.
Outwardly, things may even look fine. You likely have a respectable title, and a decent income. People around you assume you’re doing well.
Yet every time you think about the next promotion, the next role, or the direction of your life for the next five years, something inside you becomes a little quieter instead of coming alive.
Most people respond by updating their résumé, collecting more qualifications, or chasing another opportunity. Many of us spend years trying to solve an inner problem with outer decisions. I have been guilty of doing that for years.
Today, I ask a different question:
What has your inner experience been trying to tell you that your ambition keeps talking over?
Your career isn’t built merely by the decisions you make. It is one of the clearest mirrors of your relationship with yourself.
If you’re standing at a crossroads in your career, questioning your direction, or sensing that your current success isn’t the life you’re actually looking for, send me a message.
Tell me where you are, what you’re wrestling with, and what keeps repeating. I read every message personally.
Sometimes the career problem isn’t really a career problem. It’s a relationship-with-yourself problem that your career has been faithfully reflecting all along.
If that’s true for you, perhaps it’s time to stop trying to solve your career, and start understanding what it’s been reflecting back to you.
Rishi
@thefeelingeye
New on substack and you are my first subscription! Beautifully written <3
I read this, and my reaction isn’t simple (this is usually true). I think yes, there have been times in my life where I felt that, and then times when I changed nothing and went tumbling into an abyss. Both have been so important. I think of the people whose lives are filled with so much trauma that meditation is impossible for them, and the people who seek for years and never feel a spark, although I think they eventually do if they continue, It makes me sad, that some find it easily and others have to struggle so much and for so long.
Nice post, made me think.